Tuesday, September 4, 2012

"The cause of social justice needs people and organizations trained in the “science of social change,” said. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew many people who had “found intellectual growth and spiritual fulfillment” on this path. It provided the opportunity to be part of a campaign, to meet people who were about something, as well as to advance through these kinds of contacts, that lifted so many of us.

Today, we need a great social movement to reclaim our youth-- youth marginalized by poverty and prejudice, youth marginalized by militarism and commercialism, youth marginalized by selfishness and greed. We can do this in our schools, between our schools, outside of and alongside our schools, building a New American Community, with our children, using an approach I call the Invisible College.

The Invisible College is a collection of teachers, students, writers, storytellers, scribes, artists, and community organizers interfacing with the community at large, networking, helping people tell their stories to each other as well as to leadership types, building and rebuilding civic infrastructure. The Invisible College is a living network that educates and empowers, supports and develops. It is not weighed down by bureaucracy; it’s alive, organic, and moves quickly.

University students mentor high school students, who in turn mentor younger students, encouraging all to read, write, speak, interview, and perform some public service, possibly interning with a civic organization, bringing youth to such groups.

The students collect stories of community and people, go-to people and networkers as well as established leaders, learning how narrative relates one community to another, becoming lifelong learners through a process we call “learning how to learn from experience.”

“Learning how to learn from experience” is at the heart of connected knowing, in my view. I will try to establish those connections in my remarks to the conference on Sunday, September 23, discussing my own sojourn in the Invisible College and how that helped me produce the book, Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Connected knowing rejects isolated, competitive modes of
learning. In an era when the population
is more diversified and social issues no long stop at the door of the
educational institutions, the world is calling for connectedness for solutions. Harold Garfinkel (1967) once stated that what
we know always depends on where, when, and with whom we know. That is situated, subjective, and
collaborated knowing. It is not just
playing “the doubting game” (Elbow, 1973, 148) – knowledge generation takes far
more than polemics.

As John Saltmarsh has posted in his blog, the next generation of
engaged scholars is more diverse, more tied to the communities, more tuned to
social justice, and more collaborative. Such
scholars are connected knowers. Rather
than researching about communities and teaching to students, we want
research with and through communities and teach with and through our
students, as allies and advocates as we seek answers through diverse ways of
knowing for the betterment of society. On
the other hand, we are tempted by the comfy idea that “great minds think
alike,” a culture that elevates individuals over the collective, and a
discourse that obscures unification with uniformity. In the mist, we lose sight that “knowledge is
made by people together…. to specific places with histories and cultures, and
to different perspectives” (O’Meara’s blog).
True connected knowing does not come naturally or easily. Spelman (1988) noted that knowing others, even
those who are much like us, is strenuous.
Connected knowing is “a rigorous, deliberate, and demanding procedure, a
way of knowing that requires work” (Clinchy, 1996, p. 208).

As a firm believer that leadership matters, I can’t help thinking
about connected leading, an idea intrigued by the notion of connected knowing. Rustled with many notions such as leadership
for social justice, transformational leadership, shared leadership, and
collective leadership, the field of educational leadership is definedly unsettled. How can leadership ensure and promote
connected knowing within campuses and with communities? My study of the Carnegie Foundation’s community
engagement classified institutions reveal that leadership for community
engagement is a multi-layered, connected function running along the contour of
essential expertise, rather than fixated with positions and pinned to individual
leaders.

Excited as I am, I believe the 2012 conference is a live example of
connected knowing. Differences are not
something that should separate a common cause if we acknowledge and appreciate
them. The real danger is a blindness and
unwillingness to dismantle the wall that divide us and block the connections. Are we ready and committed to the effort that
such connected knowing and leading will take?

Monday, March 26, 2012

Dwight is a Professor of Higher Education Administration and
a Senior Associate at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE)
at UMASS Boston. He is also the 2009 recipient of the IARSLCE Distinguished Research Award.

Connected Knowing
has been a central element of service-learning research efforts from the
beginning. As a co-author of the first national service-learning research
agenda that was developed by the National Society for Internships and
Experiential Education, our primary purpose for furthering service-learning
research was to inform and improve our practice (Giles, Honnet & Migliore,
1991). For me, IARSLCE continues that tradition as a research organization that
strives to be ‘practitioner friendly’.

Given the split in the academy between research and
practice, theory and applied knowledge, there are few forums where these two
can come together and inform each other. Our field and research questions have
evolved over the last two decades from the ‘simple’ question of Where’s the
Learning in Service-Learning?” to much broader questions encompassing all
aspects of community engagement including impacts and roles of community
partners, the development and understanding of engaged scholarship and
institutional engagement. I look forward
to the 2102 conference to further the connections between knowing and doing, to
push the boundaries of our field beyond our current understandings of what
types of scholarship count, and how to connect with additional ways of knowing.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

When I was a student at Portland State University (PSU), I
served as a teaching assistant for University Studies (UNST), the
interdisciplinary general education program at PSU. The UNST program explores
the following four goals in its courses: Communication, Critical Thinking,
Social Justice and Diversity. In this role I assisted students in the creation
of online portfolios that demonstrated their learning. This was before there
were ‘plug and play’ portfolio platforms and my students had to build their own
websites. Through this process of web design, they made virtual connections in
the form of weblinks between the assignments they had completed and the four UNST
goals, and then they reflected on their learning with one another. I quickly
discovered how powerful this mode of teaching can be for producing robust learning
outcomes for students. This was my first experience with connected knowing.

For the last two years I have worked with the New England
Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE)’s Next
Generation Engagement Project (NGE). The
Director of the project, John Saltmarsh, challenges NGErs - a group of engaged
scholars and practitioners, early career faculty, and graduate students - to
expand traditional academic notions of expertise to include the knowledge of
students and community members, and to incorporate online tools to aid in the production
of engaged scholarship. We use web 2.0 tools to connect with one another when
we are not able to meet in person and these tools create a constant
conversation in which multiple voices are heard. We participate in connected
knowing.

The theme of this year’s IARSCLE conference, “Connected
Knowing,” describes what I believe will be the future of American higher
education. No one can deny that the academy is changing. Our students are
becoming more diverse. Tenured faculty members are decreasing in number and
non-tenured, adjunct faculty are being hired to replace them. Each year online,
for-profit education is claiming larger shares of our student body. Public
support and funding is rapidly disappearing. And the civic engagement movement
is gaining momentum and transforming the way universities and colleges interact
with their communities. Confronting these challenges is the premise of AASCU’s Red Balloon
Project that seeks to “redesign undergraduate education for the 21st
century.” The leaders of Red Balloon are using networked knowledge generation
because they believe that the best way to confront these challenges is to use
technology to work collaboratively, share expertise and devise solutions.

Of course the idea of crisis in American higher education is
not new. The history of the academy has witnessed scores of people predicting crises,
and despite this history, higher education remains intact. We will survive this
current crisis as well. But there are a number of important questions that we will
need to answer as we progress. How should students be treated and viewed? Are
they clients and customers buying a product, or are they co-creators of an
academic environment? I would argue that when students are engaged as
co-creators, they learn and grow much more than when they are treated like customers.
How should we interact with the communities surrounding our universities? Despite
all of the calls for reciprocity in community/university relationships, you
will be hard pressed to find universities that equitably engage their
communities and allow neighborhood leaders not only to participate in
university projects but also to design and assess these initiatives. The next
phase of the civic engagement movement must reckon with these power imbalances
so that community members are invited to oversee university engagement. How
will we treat adjunct faculty who have very little if any say in university
operations and yet at many public universities now outnumber tenured faculty? Despite
the important questions raised by the growing presence of adjunct faculty about
academic freedom and governance, I don’t believe that it is realistic to think
that they will disappear. In fact, if current trends are any indication, their
numbers will only continue to grow. So in the interest of creating democratic
institutions, I firmly believe that this group must be considered vital contributors
to connected learning.

With all of these complex changes taking place, we have the
opportunity to model and engage in a process of connected knowing as we advance
toward a more democratic, inclusive and educative culture in higher education.
When I think back to my days at PSU, I still remember the way my students’
learning came alive when they were able to reinforce the mental and virtual
pathways and connections between their assignments and their understanding of
the course goals. This process of connecting and co-creation is of benefit to
us all especially as we consider how we will survive the current crisis in
higher education while better serving democracy and our students.